Initiating language engagement with multimodal learning tasks

Engaging students in meaningful learning is currently a significant challenge for many teachers and those who observe daily how students’ attention spans are affected by a variety of distractions in the classroom. In fact, engagement has become one of the most fashionable research topics in educational psychology. The present study explores the engagement among five engineering undergraduates for one semester while working on L2 tasks, which entailed the multimodal analysis of 8 technology-related TED Talks and was purposefully designed to initiate them into multimodal literacy and foster their language learning. A narrative qualitative analysis of an open-ended questionnaire that the students completed at the end of the semester shows that the students were working on the task and engaged in the process. All five students acknowledged that they found L2 task completion meaningful because it could lead to positive academic outcomes and help them see the relevance of L2 in the real world. The multimodal L2 task presented in this study may offer a pedagogical scenario that can be replicated by other L2 lecturers across different contexts and communities to develop students’ multimodal competence while initiating their language engagement.